The true art of lying

One of the most ink-consuming episodes in recent American history involved a man named Daniel Ellsberg and a 7,000 page document called the “Pentagon Papers.” The entire affair was highly instructive.

Ellsberg was an insider, and is to this day called out to perform in public when other rebels, like Edward Snowden, need an imprimatur of genuineness. His role as an actor was readily apparent when, faced with a prison sentence, he was remarkably set free due to “bungling” by the Nixon Administration group called the “White House Plumbers, who left a driver’s license … excuse me, left easily discovered evidence of the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. This in turn caused the court to set Ellsberg free. This sort of play-acting is sometimes called a “Kabuki Dance,” or an ” … event that is designed to create the appearance of conflict or of an uncertain outcome, when in fact the actors have worked together to determine the outcome beforehand.” (Wikipedia, my favorite source of lies.)

The entire episode is instructive. The model used, the fake rebel/hero, the generated controversy, is used to this day to insert lies into public discourse. Snowden, for example, is an obvious fake, and his “escape” to Hong Kong and exile in Russia are nothing more than part of another stage play designed to ensure us he is genuine. Once those credentials are established, he can lie with ease. He is, after all, the enemy of our enemy, the NSA. I don’t know where he is – he could be anywhere. I doubt he is in Russia save for photo ops. Putting him there allows him freedom to wander, as no one is looking for him.

Similarly, I can guarantee you that if I visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, I would find the ambassador, diplomats, government workers, but that one person would be missing … Julian Assange. His remarkable story too is nothing but a public hoax designed to sell us his credentials as a source of “leaks.” Once established, his organization, Wikileaks, becomes another propaganda arm and can set any controversy in motion. It is, after all, the enemy of our enemy. Wikileaks has been used to spark rebellion on the north African coast, to expose Hillary Clinton emails, and a host of other topics, all fake – that is, there might be underlying substance and some agenda, but it is controlled opposition. Wikileaks is but another arm of the National Security State, used to sell lies to the naturally skeptical.

Assange is known for his blonde, nearly white hair. An actor with similar hair was used in the James Bond movie Skyfall. It is a distraction. All Assange needs to do to disguise himself is to change his hair color, and he walks freely among us. He does not live in the Ecuadorian embassy, but for so long as we think he does, we are not looking for him.

I avoid “news,” and by doing so am sometimes able to see enough of what is going on to piece together the lies of our times. I miss a lot, for sure, but there are thousands of people who observe as I do, and I seek them out. Although I am completely oblivious to the doings of the Trump Administration. for example, there’s an advantage to that: The presidency has long been stripped of any real power, and is just a distraction. Everything done there is to keep us looking in the wrong direction. By not looking, I am able to see more of what is really percolating in the news.

Back to the Pentagon Papers … more fallout …

Zinn, Ellsberg and Chomsky nearing the end of their Kabuki Dance

These events are sometimes used to introduce rookie players onto the national stage. Two men “assisted” Ellsberg, running around behind the scenes like kids playing secret agent, using primitive technology to photocopy the papers . They would go on to notoriety as champions of “the left”, but are/were controlled opposition all the way. They are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

The Papers would seal the reputation of a high-level spook-controlled agency as a champion of press freedom… The New York Times. It was never the intention of the agencies who assembled the Papers that they be kept secret, but having a controlled opposition newspaper publish them “in defiance” of the law sealed that issue too – we have an adversarial media. It reinforced the New York Times’ in its bona fides, used to this day to sell its lies.

And finally, given that no one was ever going to actually read the Pentagon Papers except those doing such reading for livelihood, the Papers, full of false history, are now used by historians as primary source. The controversy sealed the reputation of the Papers as the real truth behind the lies of Vietnam.Thus do lies about lies become mainstream history.

The real art of the lie, the selling part, is not something for rookies. It is all a confidence game, and the people who do it are very good at it, using the media to stage public plays with scripts, actors, and designed outcomes. One can avoid all of this by not watching news, by not reading newspapers, but watching the world around us nonetheless.

11 thoughts on “The true art of lying”

“It is a commonplace that “you can’t keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it the next day in the New York Times.” These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.”

The misdirection is that if only the press or Congress got wind of it they would spill the beans, even though we know they wouldn’t and are often party to the deception.

Limited hang-out our not, the leaked Podesta/Clinton emails are quite something. George Webb uses them as exhibit A in his on-going YouTube live-investigation ‘Hillary’s Henchman’. Warning: This material may cause trauma and is likely to infiltrate your dreams. Current episode:

“The Papers would seal the reputation of a high-level spook-controlled agency as a champion of press freedom… The New York Times.” Ditto with the Snowden leaks, which were first published in The Guardian, a U.K. paper with a long (and, in my opinion, entirely undeserved) reputation as a “liberal/lefty” paper fighting the good fight against establishment power. In fact, the term “Guardian reader” is a derisive label used by some conservatives in the UK to describe lefties/liberals. And so it goes…..

I have a ritual every morning. I go to the New York Times website and do their quick crossword puzzle. To get to it you have to do some considerable scrolling down the front page past all the headlines. Every once in a while I’ll see a story headline that almost entices me to click on it and I find myself slipping back into old thinking patterns- I have to remind myself that everything in that paper is a piece of made up Kabuki theater and it’s a waste of my time to read it.

I have to agree…I only watch local news to catch the weather report….especially these days with all the rain and flooding in my area (Sacramento, CA). The other day I happened to catch that a trial is currently winding up that involves a crazy bank robbery that happened 2 1/2 years ago in Stockton. I am so jaded, I don’t even believe local stories of robbery, murder and mayhem.http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/21/man-to-get-life-in-prison-for-deadly-stockton-bank-heist/

Actually weather forecasts on the news also play into the fear-mongering. They’re so hyped and exaggerated. I’ve noticed how much my family seems to get almost hysterical from even minor weather events.

The fear complemented by catchy neologisms like the “SNOWPOCALYPSE” that hit D.C. last winter (or the winter before). Or the “once every 100 years” or “once every 1,000 years” storms that seem to show up every other month.

I agree, we had flooding and the Oroville Dam situation seemed to be a problem…but evacuating almost 200K from the area was most likely unnecessary. Once the mandatory evacuation was lifted the local officials mentioned that the National Guard was being called…what the hell were they really up to? I think they possibly wanted to see if people would really leave when told to..I’m 65-70 miles from that location so it didn’t affect me, but something felt off about the whole thing.

Just as a side note, there are many other so-called newspapers bearing the name “Times”.
Just read that name backwards to judge how independent and free this papers were ever since.
BTW, learned this fact from a WWII cartoon …